Washington DC, 20059
| DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS AND ASTRONOMY | tel.: +1-202-806-6245 |
Below is a growing list of on-line course materials an links. Links marked with an asterisk (*) point to PDF files; to view them, you may need to obtain the proper plug-in and Reader software from Adobe.
As much as it used to be a practice to test the students in their knowledge of functional analysis and calculus within the homework and test questions, modern technology has made that very moot: with sites such as [WolframAlpha], which are even accessible from internet-capable mobile telephones, it is practically impossible to prevent students from using such services. On the other hand, I find it unfair to expect students to use such services, as affording an internet-capable mobile phone should not be a prerequisite for learning. I will therefore try and assign (at least in the tests) problems that the AI† behind sites such as [WolframAlpha] cannot (as yet) solve. In turn, please visit the web-page “Wolfram Technology at Howard University” for information about installing a licensed copy of Mathematica on your computer, and also on using “Wolfram Alpha Pro” under the University’s campus license; for any questions and supprt, please refer to the iLab.
• A handout on integration and solutions to ordinary
differential equations*
• A
handout on the Bessel-Legendre-Trigonometric System*
• A
handout on n-dimensional generalization of
Bessel functions*
• A handout on the uses of a generating function*
• A handout on a recursive integral with Laguerre
polynomials*
• A handout on integral equations*
• Two
handouts on integral transforms: Fourier (PDE) and Laplace (ODE system) and Laplace (ODE system)*
• A handout
on normalizing Hermite polynomials*
• A handout
on systems of nonlinear partial differential equations, as
in the predator-prey model*
• A handout on applying
differential equations to rocketry*
• Some sample quizzes*
• The first mid-term exam* (and its solution*)
• The second mid-term exam* (and its solution*)
Both mid-term exams have an in-class and a take-home component. After having done as much as possible in-class (in 1 hour), the students complete and correct their work over the next couple of days, at 2/3 of credit. That is, a proposed take-home solution (or part thereof) supersedes the in-class attempt. However, as take-home effort only carries 2/3 of the credit, students should rework only those (parts of) problems where they can successfully solve at least 1.5 times more than they did in-class.
• The final exam*, take-home and comprehensive.
From Fall 2014, the order in which the topics are covered has changed, partly owing to the reordering of the material in the 7th edition of Arfken-Webber-Harris's text, partly so as to provide a better running co-requisite for the courses Electromagnetic Theory and Classical Mechanics. For this reason, I am listing a full complement of the mid-term and final exams from 2010; they cover the same types of problems, but grouped and ordered differently than they are covered since Fall 2014.
†AI = authentic idiocy, in some folks’ opinion
©2022, Tristan Hübsch